Carnival, Brooklyn Style

Every Labor Monday for the past few years (decades?) in Brooklyn is cause for the Carnival Parade in the style of something resembling Rio's Carnival...other times it's called the West Indian Day Parade or West Indian Pride Day.

All along Eastern Parkway West Indians clamber for a viewing spot to check out the parade festivities, rubbing elbows with Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Colin Powell, now a resident of Virginia, but who grew up in Harlem and is one of the City's favorite gehtto-to-Army-general success stories.

As was the case the last four Labor Day's we've been here, we skipped the event.

Nothing against West Indians, of course, as the brightly colored flags representing the various countries go on sale a few days before hand, and get worn by revelers like capes, dew rags, neck-kerchiefs, pocket adornments, are quite pretty and give us a chance to test our knowledge of foreign-but-close-by nations.

One thing that keeps Corrie and I away is the size of the crowd. This year, while the final tally of amount of spectators is sketchy and won't be known for a while, they were expecting upwards of four-million people to attend. Let me say that again: four-million. That is a ton of people (many must have come from PA, NJ, CT, and areas of NY outside the City), almost half of the population of the entire five-boroughs, and almost twice the population of the entirety of Brooklyn itself. That's quite chaotic, and if Corrie and I were younger, and into visceral life experiences, we might be interested in checking it out...or at least I would.

Times Square at New Years is a packed sardine can of drunken party-people, and they can only boast a quarter of the amount of people they expect to line the blocks of Eastern Parkway every Labor Day.

In 2006, our first Labor Day in the City, we asked our neighbor (who's since moved back to the Bronx) Tanya if she was going to attend. "Hell no!" she responded, "somebody's always gettin' stabbed at that thing..." The next day the papers told the story of the few fights, stabbings, and a shooting or two, which, the paper made it seem like, was run of the mill. We learned to never be surprised when a few million people get together, drinking booze, and mostly natural hot-heads who take attacks on pride as fist-fight--or worse--inducing events.

To me, though, four-million people seemed like it could be in the range of the total population of the Caribbean collection of nations--until I looked it up. I was thinking at most maybe 10 million, but then I saw that as of 2000 it was estimated at 37.5 million. My bad.

It looked like they had a great time at the parade, as usual, and as usual after the parade, late last night there were roving gangs of drunken teens chasing each other up and down our street, throwing water balloons at one another, even though that wasn't my first guess. A shiver goes up your spine when you see one guy running for his life, being chased by six or eight guys, running down the middle of the street, all past your stoop...then it's a relief when you hear the water-balloon...a real fracas would probably have included guns and less running, you tell yourself.